UFC hyped up a major controversy for Wednesday’s episode of The Ultimate Fighter series featuring BJ Penn & Frankie Edgar as coaches. It proved to be the final act for both Keith Kizer & Steve Mazzagatti in Nevada. After this incident, changes were promptly made to the Athletic Commission.

The show featured a Middleweight fight between Edgar fighter Ian Stephens and Penn fighter Roger Zapata. Dana White spent the last half of the show trashing Stephens as a lay-and-pray, human wet blanket with no intent to finish an opponent with effective submissions. He went out of his way to bury Stephens. Very Dana-like but still curious behavior.

Stephens and Zapata went to a draw after two rounds. Zapata was nailing Stephens with elbows to the head throughout the fight and Mazzagatti got on his case about it. They went to a third round to determine a winner. Mazzagatti took a point away from Zapata for an illegal elbow. Dana blew his gasket and started ranting & raving about how to properly officiate that kind of situation by giving a warning first. At the end of the third round, two of the judges had scored the round a 9-9 round but one judge scored it a 10-8 round in favor of Stephens.

When Mazzagatti announced the winner of the fight, he raised Zapata’s hand and called him “Ian Zapata.” Everyone went crazy. Mazzagatti tried a do-over and said “Roger Zapata” but the UFC editors made sure to leave the mistake in. White blew a gasket and said it was impossible for the judges to give Zapata the win given that he lost a point in the third round. Dana claims that since only one judge declared a winner after the third round that the judges were asked to pick an overall winner (PRIDE-style) and they picked Zapata. This situation reminded me of the odd scenario ESPN was pushing in Nevada during the early stages of their Boxcino tournaments where there was a proposed situation involving fans, via Facebook, being able to pick a winner in the 7th round of a fight if judges could not pick a tie-breaking winner.

What is the UFC rule book say about the third round “who ever wins this round is declared the winner” when it is a draw.
I thought the fight was a draw, but that does not work for the UFC. These fights are exhibition fights and don’t actually count on fighters records so the only people it really matters that a winner was declared was Dana and the fighters.
It would be interesting to ask Dana what the UFC rule is for these exhibitions ending in a draw. I suspect that “Nevada” did not come up with the “lets cirle a winner” idea. I would think it was more likely a shit storm from the tv production crew trying to decide what to do because the one thing they could not do is declare it a majority draw.
The 10-8 final round score was reminiscent of the Hunt v Silva scoring.

Of all the judging rants he has went on the couple horrible ones he(Dana) likes he is silent. The only thing Nevada got “wrong” was the 10-8 round, the final decision, majority draw/draw was correct. In my opinion. It seems like they used this and blew it out of proportion in order to get more revenue. Oh wait, I forgot this is a reality show, maybe Kim K can be a celebrity judge for TUF 36.